Credentials given for someone with an essay in today’s New York Times prompts me to elaborate my own credentials here

There is an essay in today’s New York Times, “Your Therapist’s Secret Life,” for which the author describes herself as “a psychotherapist,” and in which she refers to the people she helps as “my patients.”

But “psychotherapist” is not a licensed profession—anyone, without any formal training, can call themselves a psychotherapist—and only people with medical licenses are commonly spoken of as having “patients.” Inadvertently, the author’s actual professional credentials have been concealed and exaggerated.

This got me to thinking that I should elaborate my own professional credentials here. In the blog’s heading, I have “M.D.” after my name, which does, indeed, mean that I am a medical doctor. In addition, I am “board certified” in psychiatry by The American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

As a psychiatrist, I did not specialize in multiple personality. Patients were not referred to me who were already suspected of having multiple personality. Some of the patients I discovered to have multiple personality had been treated under wrong diagnoses for years, a few of them by me. I was a psychiatrist for twelve years before I learned what multiple personality actually looks like and how to make the diagnosis.

And even after I learned how to diagnose and treat multiple personality, it involved less than 5% of my patients. If readers of this blog think that I am prone to see everyone as having multiple personality, they are mistaken.

For more than thirty years, I practiced outpatient psychiatry in the adult psychiatry clinic of a general hospital, from which I retired in good standing. I was eager to retire, because I had long planned to use retirement to write a novel. But once in retirement, I decided that my abilities were more suited to writing this blog.

None of the fiction writers I discuss in this blog attended the clinic where I worked, and I have never met, or had any private information about, any of them. I depend completely on what has been published.

Latest Siri Hustvedt (post 7) in New York Times Book Review: Protagonist may have two “I’s” who coexist, but multiple personality not considered

One person, who has two or more “I’s” who coexist, is an abbreviated definition of multiple personality.

The review of Hustvedt’s latest novel, Memories of the Future, which it calls “a lightly fictionalized memoir,” does not realize that the novel may be talking about multiple personality (in the way that most novels talk about multiple personality: unlabeled and unacknowledged).

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/books/review/siri-hustvedt-memories-of-the-future.html

The review does not mention any of Hustvedt’s previous books, which might have helped readers realize where the author is coming from.

In six past posts, I cite three of Hustvedt’s books. Please search “Siri Hustvedt.”

Namelessness: It is NOT an experimental, dystopian, or any other kind of literary technique. Then what is it, and what does it mean?

In every life circumstance from the best utopia to the worst dystopia, everyone has a specific designation, a name and/or number. People themselves like to have a name, to distinguish themselves from other people. People in power want everyone to have a name or number, so they can get everyone’s attention, tell them what to do, and keep track of them.

The only life circumstance with namelessness is multiple personality. Some alternate personalities don’t have a name.

For example, let’s say a person (the regular, host personality) is not a poet, is not interested in poetry, and never writes poems. But, unknown to them, they have an alternate personality who does write poems—usually at night, when the host personality assumes they have been sleeping—and that particular alternate personality does nothing else but write poems for their own private enjoyment. They keep the poems in a hiding place, and nobody else knows about either them or their poems. Why would such an alternate personality need a name? They don’t need a name, and they may not have one.

(This is a real life example, discovered when a person’s host personality had gone into a place in her apartment where she had not been in the habit of going, and found handwritten poems whose existence she couldn’t account for. In my interviewing her about these poems (without drugs or hypnosis), she switched to a nameless alternate personality, who knew all about the poems. When the person switched back to her regular personality, she had amnesia for my conversation with the poem-writing alternate personality.)

Namelessness does not, and would not, occur in any life situation other than multiple personality. So when you see it in fiction writing, it is usually not an intentional literary technique, but a manifestation of the fiction writer’s trait of multiple personality.

For further discussion of this recurring topic, search “namelessness” and “nameless.”

“Milkman” by Anna Burns (post 5): Italics in text indicates what is said to protagonist by her alternate personality

In the quoted passage below, the narrator/protagonist says “I told myself” (not in italics, since it is the regular personality speaking) rather than “I thought,” because she recognizes that what is in italics, although coming from her own head, is not her own thought: it is the thought of an alternate personality.

The italic speaker (alternate personality) distinguishes herself from the regular personality by referring to the protagonist as “you.” After the italic passage, the protagonist refers back to it as having come from a particular “part” (alternate personality) of herself. This “part” has employed a proper noun (“Ivor”) for clarity, whereas the protagonist (regular personality), in the previous 107 pages, has never referred to a person by a regular name. 

“…And now, having pitted myself against a sharp, cold intelligence such as I now imagined was that of the milkman, hardly could I backtrack and present a simpler story — the true story — for if I did, that would only compound matters for maybe-boyfriend as well as reveal to this milkman I’d been lying all along.

“This is mad, you’re mad, I told myself. What are you gonna say next and what if this flag business ends up at kangaroo court level? Will you propound that the guy from ‘over the road’ — Ivor, shall we say? — who must be assumed, more because of his religion than because of his fictitiousness, not to want to appear in person in an enemy-renouncer commandery, might be willing all the same, in support of his workmate, to write a little note? Is Ivor in this notelette going to vouch that it was he who possessed the bit with the flag on, perhaps enclosing a Polaroid of himself beside this bit with the flag on, with other indications in the background of his ‘over the road’ status — more flags perhaps? That should do the trick.

"This predictive if sarcastic part of myself again brought back the rashness of maybe-boyfriend…” (1, pp. 108-109).

When a novel has multiple personality, but does not label or acknowledge it as such, italics may be used to indicate what is said or thought by an alternate personality. I have seen this done by other writers, too.

1. Anna Burns. Milkman. Minneapolis Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2018.

“Milkman” by Anna Burns (post 4): The protagonist and another character each speak to their own alternate personalities

The protagonist’s “maybe-boyfriend” has a male friend who cooks and is called “chef.” And while maybe-boyfriend is busy upstairs, chef is downstairs in the kitchen.

The protagonist hears chef talking to his alternate personality, which she then compares to when she talks to her own alternate personality:

“And now maybe-boyfriend…got busy, and chef downstairs…was busy in the kitchen. He was talking to himself which was not rare…As usual I could hear him describing to some imaginary person who appeared to be serving an apprenticeship under him, everything he was doing regarding the making of the meal. Often he’d say something like, ‘Just do it this way. There’s an easier way, you know. And remember, we can develop a unique style and technique without histrionics and drama’ and whenever he did this, he’d sound soft and much more accommodating than when he was interacting with real people in real life. He liked this acolyte who, from the sound of chef’s praise and encouragement, was a good attentive learner…Once I peeked in when he was inviting his invisible apprentice to try some, and there he was, all alone, raising a spoon to his own lips. At that time, which was the first time I’d witnessed chef doing this, he put me in mind of me during the times I did my mental ticking-off of landmarks which I’d do peripherally whilst also doing my reading-while-walking. I’d pause after a page or so, to take stock of my surrounding, also occasionally to be specific and helpful to someone in my head who’d just enquired directions of me. I’d imagine myself pointing and saying, ‘Well, orientation is there,’ meaning the person needed to go round such-and-such a corner. ‘Go there,’ I’d say. ‘Just round that corner. See this corner? Go round it and when you get to the junction by the letterbox at the start of the ten-minute area you head up by the usual place.’ The usual place was our graveyard and this directing would be my way of helping some lost but appreciative person. And here was chef in his kitchen doing much the same thing” (1, pp. 35-36).

Comment

So far, the multiple personality of these two characters has not been labeled as multiple personality. It is treated as ordinary, pitiful and/or endearing, imaginative psychology.

Multiple personality is not mentioned in any review I’ve seen. Did the reviewers and Booker Prize judges read the above passage?

My guess is that they did read it, but since the text does not label it as multiple personality, and since the novel is not marketed as being about multiple personality, they didn’t think of it.

However, I am only up to page 36, and my opinion may be premature.

1. Anna Burns. Milkman. Minneapolis Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2018.

“Milkman” by Anna Burns (post 3): 2018 Booker Prize novel begins with nameless characters and other indications of multiple personality

In the previous two posts based on published interviews, Anna Burns said that her stories and characters, somehow, just came to her. She said that she, the personality being interviewed, was not the most authoritative part of her mind in regard to what her novels meant.

I have just started Milkman, which appears to be about the gender and social politics of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. The nameless first-person narrator is an 18-year-old woman, who reads nineteenth-century novels like Ivanhoe, “because I did not like the twentieth century” (1, p. 5).

“Milkman” is the 41-year-old man who has been harassing her. “Maybe-boyfriend” is the young man she has been dating.

Namelessness, leading to the practical necessity of inventing nicknames (“milkman”) or naming-by-function (“maybe-boyfriend”), suggests that the novel was written by a person with multiple personality. Why do I say that?

As a psychiatrist, when I would see a person with multiple personality, I would often find that an alternate personality didn’t have a name. So, as a practical matter, I had to refer to that alternate personality by their major function or emotion; e.g., “poet” if they wrote poems or “angry one” if that was their characteristic emotion. And that is the kind of naming process used in this novel.

Another indication of multiple personality is the protagonist’s referring to herself as having “parts” that have minds of their own: “Another part of me though, was thinking, is he making this up” (1, p. 9).

And her reaction to her maybe-boyfriend’s sexual touching of her neck suggests multiple personality:

“Any time the fingers were there — between my neck and skull — I’d forget everything — not just things that happened moments before the fingers, but everything — who I was, what I was doing, all my memories, everything about anything, except being there, in that moment, with him” (1, p. 19).

A person whose neck was an erogenous zone, but who didn’t have multiple personality, might become very aroused, be very much in the moment, might even have an orgasm, but would not actually forget who she was and all her memories. What is being described is the person’s host personality losing control, just prior to switching to an alternate personality.

1. Anna Burns. Milkman. Minneapolis Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2018.

“Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932” by Francine Prose: a novelization of the life of Violette Morris, who led “a double life”

This novel, discussed by Francine Prose in a seven-minute radio interview (1), is based on the life of a real person, Violette Morris (2), and her association with a real Paris nightclub, Le Monocle (3).

What was it about this history, symbolized by this nightclub, that resonated with Francine Prose? In the words of one character, “What moved and gladdened me was that the club’s popularity, its longevity, and its very existence seemed to prove that each of us leads a double life” (4, p. 133).

Does Francine Prose, as a fiction writer, lead a double, multiple personality, life? She has said that she does, in a brief essay on her creative process, “She and I…and Someone Else” (5).

1. http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/wesun/2014/05/20140518_wesun_novel_humanizes_the_hyena_of_the_gestapo.mp3

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violette_Morris

3. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/le-monocle-1932/

4. Francine Prose. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. New York, HarperCollins, 2014.

5. Francine Prose. “She and I…and Someone Else,” pp. 155-157, in Daniel Halpern (Editor), Who’s Writing This? Fifty-five Writers on Humor, Courage, Self-Loathing, and the Creative Process. New York, Ecco/Harper Perennial, 1995.

“Experiment in Autobiography” by H. G. Wells: The difference between him and Henry James is that James had multiple personality, but Wells doesn’t

H. G. Wells

“We may have single or multiple personas and in the latter case we are charged with inconsistencies and puzzle ourselves and our friends…

“I do not find in this cerebrum of mine any trace…of what is called double personalities. In the classical instances of double personality psychologists tell of whole distinct networks of memory and impulse, co-existing side by side in the same brain yet functioning independently, which are alternative and often quite contradictory one to the other…I have met and lived in close contact with one or two individuals of this alternating type…but it is my belief that I remain always very much the same personality. I do not think I delude myself about this” (1, pp. 9-19).

Henry James

“…discussions I [H. G. Wells] had with Henry James a third of a century ago. He was a very important figure in the literary world of that time and a shrewd and penetrating critic of the technique by which he lived. He liked me and found my work respectable enough to be greatly distressed about it. I bothered him and he bothered me…He had no idea of the possible use of the novel as a help to conduct. His mind turned away from any such idea. From his point of view there were not so much ‘novels’ as The Novel, and it was a very high and important achievement. He thought of it as an Art Form and novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type… I was by nature and education unsympathetic with this mental disposition…

“I recall a talk I had with him soon after the publication of [Well’s] Marriage. With tact and circumlocution, James broke it to me, that he found a remarkable deficiency in that story…

“[In Well’s story,] in order to avoid the traffic in the high road the two young people take their respective donkey carts into a side lane and remain there talking for three hours. And this is where James’s objection came in. Of the three hours of intercourse in the lane the novel tells nothing, except that the young people emerged in open and declared love with each other. This, said James, wasn’t playing the game…Gently but firmly he insisted that I did not myself know what had happened and what was said in that lane…that I had not thought out the individualities concerned with sufficient care and thoroughness…Henry James was quite right in saying that I had not thought out these two people to the pitch of saturation and that they did not behave unconsciously and naturally…

“If the Novel was properly a presentation of real people as real people, in absolutely natural reaction in a story, then my characters were not simply sketchy, they were eked out by wires and pads of non-living matter and they stood condemned…

“…by implication…my so-called novels were artless self-revelatory stuff, falling far away from a stately ideal by which they had to be judged” (1, pp. 410-415).

Comment

The above is a discussion of the difference between novels written by someone who does not have multiple personality trait, H. G. Wells, and someone who does have multiple personality trait, Henry James (search Henry James for past posts). However, Wells fails to connect the issue of multiple personality to the difference between him and James in how they got their characters.

It is not, as Wells thinks, that James had “thought out the individualities [of his characters] with sufficient care and thoroughness,” but that James had not gotten his characters by thinking them out. James’s characters had come into being as alternate personalities with minds of their own.

1. H. G. Wells. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). New York, The Macmillan Company, 1934.

“Some Other, Better Otto” by Deborah Eisenberg (post 2): Another of this author’s short stories with unacknowledged issues of multiple personality

As the title suggests, the protagonist, Otto, is dissatisfied with his personality. And he wonders—prompted by the science-fiction idea of multiple, parallel universes, discussed by other characters—if “there could be an infinitude of selves” in those infinite alternate realities. In other words, might he have many alternate personalities, one of which might be better than the one he has now?

In the very last paragraph of the story, Otto is sitting at home, when, suddenly, he feels the hand of his partner, William, resting on his shoulder. Taken by surprise, Otto thinks, “Had he [Otto] been asleep?” But Otto had not been asleep. The implication is that Otto has had a memory gap for a period of time that another personality had been in control. However, it doesn’t appear that the author was aware of, and had intended, this implication.

Another character who raises the issue of multiple personality is Otto’s sister, Sharon. She had once been a brilliant scientist, but became mentally ill, and has had recurrent, seemingly psychotic, episodes. Although Sharon’s diagnosis is not stated, it is implied that she has schizophrenia.

However, at one point, Otto ponders, “if time was the multiplicity Sharon and William seemed to believe it was, maybe it contained multiple Sharons, perhaps some existing in happier conditions…”

And in Sharon’s latest disturbed episode, the police have been called, and she is taken to the hospital. By the time Otto hears of it and gets to the hospital, the psychiatrist is ready to send Sharon home, cautioning Sharon not to bite any policemen again.

When the psychiatrist tells Otto, with Sharon standing there, about Sharon’s having bitten one of the policemen, Sharon says, “I did?” That is, she does not remember it. She has a memory gap. What does that mean?

Schizophrenia does not have memory gaps. Multiple personality does.

In short, this story gives two characters concerns and symptoms of multiple personality, but does not acknowledge the issue.

1. Deborah Eisenberg. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010.

Impersonation: Term used by both John Updike and Philip Roth for switching to alternate personalities, which they say is essence of fiction writing process

John Updike

This is how Updike begins an essay is which he discusses a chapter from Either/Or, a book by Kierkegaard: “Søren Kierkegaard’s method…resembles that of a fiction writer: he engages in multiple impersonations…”

Updike then notes that “Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s first major work…a bulky, two-volume collection of papers,” was attributed to “Victor Eremita (‘Victor Hermit’),” which was one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous, alternate personalities, which I listed in a recent post here.

Thus, Updike says that the method of the fiction writer is to “engage in multiple impersonations” in the same sense that Kierkegaard did when he switched to his various pseudonymous, writing personalities, for whose writings Kierkegaard’s ordinary personality refused to take credit (see recent post).

This reminds me of my first post in June 2013 on Charles Dickens, in which I quote his business manager as saying that Dickens would talk to him about the novels almost as if he, Dickens, didn’t write them; and Dickens’s biographer quotes Dickens about his writings as saying that he, Dickens, really does not invent it.

John Updike. More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 139.

Philip Roth

“…everybody’s split…Everybody is full of cracks and fissures…Hiding them is sometimes taken for…not having them…It’s all the art of impersonation…That’s the fundamental novelistic gift…His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down…Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature…I am somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing” (1).

In The Counterlife, Roth’s alternate personality, Zuckerman, says:

“It’s all impersonation — in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through…What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required…” (2, p. 28).

“If there is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation — the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate” (2, p. 90).

Of course, Roth exaggerates when he says, in effect, that everyone has multiple personality trait, but that many people hide it. This is true of 90% of novelists, but of probably no more than 30% of the general public.

1. Hermione Lee. “Philip Roth: The Art of Fiction” (1984), in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV. New York, Picador, 2009, pp. 203-235.

2. Timothy Parrish (Editor). The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

“Rabbit, Run” by John Updike (post 5): Rabbit Angstrom urges postpartum, sober, alcoholic wife to drink, to get her to have sex

When she does not do what he wants, he leaves home to be with a prostitute. His wife then gets very drunk, and accidentally drowns the baby in the bathtub.

Why do Rabbit and his wife act this way? No explanation is given, leaving the impression that they are just not very intelligent or emotionally mature.

And since the characters have no clear signs of multiple personality, the novel has little sense of psychological depth, and does not seem very literary.

“Rabbit, Run” by John Updike (post 4): Part II on his protagonist’s name, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom

Updike was happy with his height (6’3”), but he was unhappy with his mouth and nose. His mouth stuttered and his nose was too big.

In the first paragraph of the novel, “Rabbit Angstrom” is described as “six three,” with “a nervous flutter under his brief nose.” His nose is later described as “a neat smooth button” (1, p. 139).

Updike’s stuttering has been reduced to a “flutter.” His big nose has been reduced to a “button.”

The first paragraph adds that his nickname was given to him when he was a boy.

So I infer that Updike, as a boy, wished for his stuttering to be eliminated and his nose to be reduced in size. His alternate personality, Rabbit, resulted.

1. John Updike. Rabbit, Run. New York, Fawcett Books, 1960.

“Rabbit, Run” by John Updike (post 3): Part I on the meaning of his protagonist’s name, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom

Updike chose the name “Angstrom” to represent the angst of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. “Updike once described Harry Angstrom as a ‘representative Kierkegaardian man’: Man in a state of fear and trembling, separated from God, haunted by dread, twisted by the conflicting demands of his animal biology and human intelligence, of the social contract and the inner imperatives” (1, pp. 197-198).

1. Adam Begley. Updike. New York, HarperCollins, 2014.

Kierkegaard’s influence on 20th Century Writers (including Updike), and his Well-Known, Pseudonymous, Alternate Personalities

From Wikipedia

“Kierkegaard [1813-1855] has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, David Lodge, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and John Updike…

“Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms that he used to present distinctive viewpoints and to interact with each other in complex dialogue. He explored particularly complex problems from different viewpoints, each under a different pseudonym…

“Kierkegaard's most important pseudonyms, in chronological order, were:

— Victor Eremita, editor of Either/Or

— A, writer of many articles in Either/Or

— Judge William, author of rebuttals to A in Either/Or

— Johannes de silentio, author of Fear and Trembling

— Constantine Constantius, author of the first half of Repetition

— Young Man, author of the second half of Repetition

— Vigilius Haufniensis, author of The Concept of Anxiety

— Nicolaus Notabene, author of Prefaces

— Hilarius Bookbinder, editor of Stages on Life's Way

— Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding

— Unscientific Postscript

— Inter et Inter, author of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

— H.H., author of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays

— Anti-Climacus, author of The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity.”

Kierkegaard Said:

“I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy, which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence…Only when I am producing do I feel well. Then I forget all life’s discomforts, all suffering, then I am absorbed in my thought and happy. If I let my work alone for a couple of days I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, troubled, my head heavy and burdened.” It was due to his melancholy, he tells us, that he “discovered and poetically traveled through a whole fantasy world.” His writing was not an agreeable amusement, but “the product of an irresistible inward impulse, a melancholy man’s only possibility…As Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories, so I save myself or keep myself alive by writing…

“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…

“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).

John Updike, and the other writers mentioned above, evidently identified, to one extent or another, with what Kierkegaard said.

1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

“Updike and I” by John Updike (post 2): Essay on creative process, from book that seems to assume writers’ multiple personality is an open secret

According to the back cover, “Editor Daniel Halpern was profoundly curious about the creative process—so he asked fifty-five world-renowned writers to briefly muse on ‘the fictional persona behind the scenes,’ the alter(ed) ego who takes over when there is true literary work to be done” (1).

In explaining to the writers what he wanted, Halpern mentioned the famous mini-essay by Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” which people may think is a joke. But neither Borges’s essay nor Updike’s is labeled as fiction.

Here is an excerpt from “Updike and I”:

“…people, mistaking me for him, stop me on the street and ask me for his autograph. I am always surprised that I resemble him so closely that we can be confused…they do not realize that he works only in the medium of the written word…Thrust into ‘real’ time, he can scarcely function, and his awkward pleasantries and anxious stutter emerge…Myself, I am rather suave. I think fast, on my feet, and have no use for the qualificatory complexities…in which he is customarily mired. I move swiftly and rather blindly through life, spending the money he earns…

“That he takes up so much of my time…I resent…he spends more and more time being Updike, that monster of whom my boyhood dreamed…

“Suppose, some day, he fails to show up? I would attempt to do his work, but no one would be fooled” (1, pp. 182-183).

There are two schools of thought about the idea that most fiction writers have what I call “multiple personality trait.” Some people think the idea is ridiculous. Others think it is an open secret. Halpern appears to think it is an open secret. And maybe most fiction writers do, too. But they like to discuss it with a sense of humor, affording them plausible deniability.

1. Daniel Halpern (Editor). Who’s Writing This? Fifty-Five Writers on Humor, Courage, Self-Loathing, and the Creative Process. New York, Ecco/Harper Perennial, 1995.

“The Mirage” by Naguib Mahfouz (post 4): Author treats the protagonist’s rational, nonpsychotic voices as one of the most normal things about him

Kamil Ru’ba Laz is the first-person narrator of his psycho-socially dysfunctional life. He sleeps in the same bed as his divorced mother until his mid-twenties, then gets married, but is impotent with his wife, who is unfaithful and dies from an abortion, a day before his mother dies of a heart attack. “…his happiness was nothing but a mirage…” (1, p. 273).

It is understandable that Kamil would be ambivalent, but there is nothing in this story that would require Kamil to have his ambivalence expressed in terms of rational, nonpsychotic voices in his head. Why are such voices treated by the author as ordinary psychology?

“A voice inside me told me that beyond this dreary, narrow, constricted life there lay another that was bright, expansive, and free…” (1, p. 89).

“As though it were a stranger speaking, I said to myself: Tonight I’m going to try women and wine!” (1, p. 124).

“As though I were preaching to an unseen companion, I whispered, ‘If you love someone, declare your affection for her…’ ” (1, p. 127).

“Gone was the Kamil that had been brought into being by rage and desperation, and all that remained was the other Kamil as he existed in his natural state” (1, p. 170).

“In fact, an inner voice told me to run away” (1, p. 289).

“…I was possessed by a spirit of adventure the likes of which I’d never seen in myself. ‘Give it a try!’ it said to me” (1, p. 317).

“…I paused, with a voice inside me urging me to turn on my heels and run” (1, p. 348).

“…a voice inside me suggested that I postpone that decision till later” (1, p. 372).

“…my ears were filled with that old voice…” (1, p. 382).

Readers of this novel will form two groups regarding Kamil’s voices. One group, whose members have multiple personality trait and hear their own nonpsychotic voices (of alternate personalities), will consider it ordinary psychology. The other group, whose members do not have multiple personality trait and do not hear such voices, will assume that they are meant only metaphorically.

I suspect that the Nobel Prize-winning author, like most great fiction writers, was a member of the first group.

1. Naguib Mahfouz. The Mirage [1948]. Trans. Nancy Roberts. Cairo, The American University in Cairo Press, 2009.

Do Fiction Writers have alternate personalities?

Yes, 90% do, based on:

1. Marjorie Taylor’s study of 50 fiction writers:

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf and

2. my discussion, on this site, of works by 200 great writers.

Characters and Personalities: Minds of Their Own

Many writers say that they experience their important characters as having minds of their own. I used to think they were joking.

But after meeting people who have multiple personality—whose alternate personalities have minds of their own—I finally realized that authors aren’t joking.

Both characters and alternate personalities are imaginary people who seem to have minds of their own: they are the same psychological phenomenon.

Clinical Disorder vs. Normal Trait

Most fiction writers have a normal form of multiple personality. It does not cause them distress or dysfunction. They are not mentally ill. They do not have multiple personality disorder. They have multiple personality trait.

Only 1.5% of people have multiple personality disorder, but up to 30% of people may have multiple personality trait. Fiction writers come from that normal thirty percent.

What is dissociation?

Multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder) is not a psychosis and has nothing to do with schizophrenia. It is a dissociative disorder. And its normal version, multiple personalty trait, is a dissociative trait. Dissociation means divided consciousness (divided into personalities or characters).

Freudian Blind Spot

Although Freud acknowledged the existence of genuine cases of multiple personality, his theories—based on repression, not dissociation—had a blind spot for multiple personality.

Reader’s Blind Spot

Most readers assume that multiple personality in a novel, play, or poem would be obvious. So if it’s not mentioned, and the plot doesn’t appear to have anything to do with multiple personality, readers don’t think of it.

Findings

Most symptoms of multiple personality in literature are not labeled as such, because the author did not intend to give the character multiple personality, per se. The symptoms are there, because they reflect the author’s sense of ordinary psychology, based on the author’s own psychology.

Unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality are found in great literature ranging from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

In Anna Karenina, the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality are unlabeled, but integral to the story. In Gone Girl, the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality are unlabeled and gratuitous (except that they reflect the author’s view of ordinary psychology).

Anna Karenina, as I explain in past posts, is thrown under the train by an alternate personality, which would be interesting for a reader to know. And you just won’t understand some of what goes on in Gone Girl unless you recognize it as symptoms of the protagonist’s multiple personality.

Where to Begin

You need Search. If you are using a smartphone and don’t see a Search Box at the top of your screen, please switch to a larger category of device.

I recommend that you begin by searching the following, in this order: 1. Dickens, 2. Oates, 3. Anna Karenina, and 4. Gone Girl.

Where Next

From the name and subject indices, choose whatever writers and subjects you wish. Or use the archive in the sidebar to click on past years.

Think of this site as a serial book. Many of the best chapters have come earlier. If you read only recent chapters (posts), you will miss most of what this site has to offer.

Whenever you have a chance, visit again, and read about 200 great writers.

Seven Faces of Multiple Personality in Literature

1. Labeled: A character is labeled as having “multiple personality” (aka dual personality, split personality, or dissociative identity). In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a synonym was double consciousness. If readers don’t see an explicit label of multiple personality, they usually don’t think of it.

Other synonyms include alter ego, the double, doppelgänger, demon or spirit possession, eidolon, and daemon, but these are often thought of as literary or religious issues.

2. Implied: Although the multiple personality is not labeled as such, many readers see it as implied when a character has more then one name, correlated with different behavior; for example, Gollum/Sméagol and Jekyll/Hyde. But since the multiple personality is not labeled as such, it is not known whether the author thought of it as multiple personality, per se.

3. Unacknowledged: A character has symptoms of multiple personality (e.g., memory gaps or nonpsychotic voices), and it is integral to the plot and character development, but since it is not labeled as multiple personality, readers don’t think of it as multiple personality, and the author may not have thought of it in those terms, either.

4. Gratuitous: Multiple personality symptoms are unacknowledged and usually unnoticed, but they are not necessary to plot and character development, and are present only because the author saw them as ordinary psychology, based on the author’s own psychology.

5. Pseudonyms: When authors have an alternate personality who prefers another genre or simply wants to publish under its own name, it may publish under a pseudonym. In some cases, the author’s supposedly regular name is already a pseudonymous alternate personality.

6. Pseudo-nicknames: The narrator refers to a character by two different names (representing two different personalities), but, unlike the obviously different names in the implied type (see above), the second name is easily mistaken for just a nickname or alternate form of address.

7. Writing Process: The author may have narrators, characters, voices, muses, and other behind-the-scenes alternate personalities involved in the writing process. (An alternate personality is an imaginary psychological entity that has a sense of its own identity, its own memory, and its own opinions; i.e., it seems to have a mind of its own.)

“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy (post 3): Key to interpretation is that central character is mutually-identified twins, essentially Rahel/Estha

The reader is told that for Rahel and Estha (fraternal twins), “there was no Each, no Other” (1, p. 215); they were essentially one person.

The only way that could be true would be if they were the alternate personalities of one person. But since the narrator has not labeled it as multiple personality, readers don’t think of it.

At the end of the novel, when the twins have sexual relations, most readers interpret it as a controversial cliff-hanger: Is incest permissible? What will happen in their relationship?

But it may be one more attempt by some personality on the novel’s writing committee to show the reader that Rahel and Estha are really one person: See, they are physically together! (That would be childish logic, but you have to remember that multiple personality begins in childhood, and some alternate personalities may have a child-like perspective.)

I know the idea that the central character is Rahel/Estha will seem far-fetched to most people. After all, the narrator also implies, quite often, that Rahel and Estha are two separate people. And when the author refers to her characters in interviews, she mentions them as two separate people.

But as Margaret Atwood (another Booker Prize winner) has said, you can never speak to the person who wrote the book you just read, because you will be speaking to the author’s regular personality, not their writing personality.

And if there are inconsistent views of the characters in the novel itself, that is probably because there were multiple personalities participating in the writing, and they sometimes differed.

Ultimately, however, the key to interpreting this novel is its choice to make the central character a pair of twins, who claim to be one person, psychologically. The choice to do that with the central character makes multiple personality the novel’s subtext.

1. Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things [1997]. New York, Random House, 2008.

“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy (post 2): Rahel's mother, too, may have had multiple personality

When her husband’s “bouts of violence began to include the children…Ammu left her husband and returned, unwelcome, to her parents in Ayemenem…

“Occasionally, when Ammu listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch, to a better, happier place. On days like this there was something restless and untamed about her. As though she had temporarily set aside the morality of motherhood and divorcée-hood. Even her walk changed from a safe mother-walk to another wilder sort of walk. She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spent hours on the riverbank…and had midnight swims.

“What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber…

“Sometimes she was the most beautiful woman that Estha and Rahel had ever seen. And sometimes she wasn’t” (1, pp. 42-44).

Multiple personality can be multigenerational.

1. Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things [1997]. New York, Random House, 2008.

Note (added March 5, 2019): Multiple personality begins in childhood. So, in real life, if Ammu had multiple personality, it would have been aggravated by her husband's abuse, but it would have begun during her own childhood.